Adler, Alfred (1870–1937)

Austrian psychologist. He saw the ‘will to power’ as more influential in accounting for human behaviour than the sexual drive. A dispute over this theory led to the dissolution of his ten-year collaboration with psychiatry's founder Sigmund Freud.

The concepts of inferiority complex and overcompensation originated with Adler.

Born and trained in Vienna, Adler was a general practitioner and nerve specialist there 1897–1927. By 1902 he had made contact with Freud. He played a major part in the development of the psychoanalytical movement, and was president of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society. But by 1907 he had shifted his theory away from Freud's emphasis on infantile sexuality towards power as the origin of neuroses; in 1911 Adler, and a number of others, left the Freudian circle and founded the Individual Psychology Movement. He moved to the USA in 1935.

Adler held that much neurotic behaviour is a result of feelings of inadequacy or inferiority caused by, for instance, being the youngest in a family or being a child who is trying to compete in an adult world. In an attempt to overcome these feelings the patient overcompensates, often at the expense of normal social behaviour or, as Adler put it, ‘social interest’. Adler's belief led on to his idea that a person can realize this ambition alone, which affects the way in which a psychiatrist helps a patient. Although his psychology made good sense, it lacked adequate definition and rigour of method.

Adler's works include Study of Organ Inferiority and its Psychical Compensation 1907, translated 1917, The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology 1920, translated 1924, and Understanding Human Nature 1927. In his essentially most significant book, The Neurotic Constitution 1912, translated 1917, he insists that human character and actions must be explained teleologically.